The Daily Zeitgeist - Sane-Washing Trump, AI + Cops = Bad As It Sounds 08.30.24

Episode Date: August 30, 2024

In episode 1735, Jack and Miles are joined by co-founder and Executive Director of Partners for Justice, Emily Galvin-Almanza, to discuss… Mainstream Media Actually HELPING The Trump Campaign…, AI Police Reports Are Here To Save The Police From Doing Any Work, Bad Faith NYTimes Article About Alternatives to Policing and more! Emily Galvin-Almanza's 'Project 2025' Twitter Thread Mainstream Media Actually HELPING The Trump Campaign… CNN focus group of conservative women turns out to be comprised of GOP operatives AI Police Reports Are Here To Save The Police From Doing Any Work Cops Are Using AI to Write Police Reports Axon Facing Class Action Over Alleged Monopoly on Taser, Body Camera Markets Axon reports Q1 2024 revenue of $461 million, up 34% year over year, raises outlook A firm proposes using Taser-armed drones to stop school shootings Axon’s Ethics Board Resigned Over Taser-Armed Drones. Then the Company Bought a Military Drone Maker Taser maker Axon has a moving backstory. It's mostly a myth Taser Company Axon Is Selling AI That Turns Body Cam Audio Into Police Reports Bad Faith NYTimes Article About Alternatives to Policing Congress Is Investing in Alternatives to Police. Can They Work? A study gave cash and therapy to men at risk of criminal behavior. 10 years later, the results are in. LISTEN: Selfish High Heels by Yung Bae feat. Macross 82-99 & HarrisonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I could not fucking sleep all night. All night? I've been up like a fucking owl. Like Theo Vaughn was telling Donald Trump in an interview. I should have you like an owl, homie. Hell, man, you'd be your own fucking night. You'd be in front of a street light. Like a street light, man.

Just like... And that's good? No! And that's good. And that's good. No, that's good. And that feeling you like that feeling. No, no, no, no. I do not want to feel like a vampire with a heart condition. And yeah, for the record, it's not because I was doing cocaine.

This had a bit of low grade anxiety that kept me up all night is that what they're calling it yeah okay okay all right we have like an owl homie we call that uh we call that poor people's cocaine anxiety yeah it's just a little great anxiety the poor man's cocaine hey i'm gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in.

Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series,

Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry, Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry, Caitlin Clark versus Angel Reese. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game.

Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's basketball. And on this new season, we'll cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio apps, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean?

It's right here in black and white in print. It's bigger than a flag or mascot. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 353, episode 5 of Dirt Daily Zeitgeist, a production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American shared consciousness, and it 53, episode 5 of Dirt Daily Zeitgeist. A production of iHeartRadio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into American Shared Consciousness. And it is Friday, August 30th, 2024.

Yeah, yeah. Is this the last day? No, well, there's 31 days. There's 31 days, half of August. Exactly. Also, hey, guess who I get to shout out today? Shout out to my dad. It's his birthday.

You're 70 years old up in this place. Congrats to you. I was just at a friend of my youngest's, and they have an amazing work from your dad on their wall. Oh, they do? Yeah, yeah. Oh, well, you know. Very white thing. My dad is internationally known and locally respected as an artist, so I appreciate the support from everybody uh but also august 30th is national beach day national grief awareness day national toasted marshmallow day and for all you college

fans it's national college colors day i am not wearing mine uh sadly i should normally maybe kind of i need i need some more gray but I feel like I wear my alma mater ship because I'm like, well, I gave these people so much money. I need to get something out of it. They should brand me. Yeah, yeah. The amount of money I gave them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Alright, well, my name is Jack O'Brien, aka My Donuts Bring JD Vance to the Yard, and he's like, whatever makes sense. Damn right, whatever makes sense. Damn right, whatever makes sense. That one courtesy of La Caroni on the Discord. Whatever makes sense. New JD Vance flub just dropped.

I'm sure we talked about it on yesterday's trending. But his, did you see? Oh, the Hulk Hogan, I'm not going to take my shirt off. Don't worry, everybody, I'm not going to take my shirt off. Okay. It's a banger. It's another certified banger. While he was being booed by firefighters.

Just silence. Yeah. Anyways, I'm thrilled to be joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray. It's Miles Gray, a.k.a. Whale Was Beached. Yeah. Miles Gray! It's Miles Gray, a.k.a. Whale Was Beached. Yeah, beheaded it with a chainsaw and strapped it to the top of the car. Whale Was Beached, yeah, cause I'm a normal hunter and whales are cool. You know that they are. Oh, whales are...

They are. Oh, whales are. Okay. Shout out to Cleo.universe for that creep TLC RFK hunter. Another creep. Yeah. A true, true creep. But yeah, that whale was beached.

And hey, as Michael Knowles on the Daily Wire said, and whales are cool. So why wouldn't you? Whales are cool and he's a hunter. So it's normal. Find a new angle. Exactly. Chain sawing a whale's head's normal. Find a new angle. Exactly. Chainsawing a whale's head is normal. Find a new angle. Whale juice is delicious. Whale juice is wonderful. We are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by a poet and lawyer who is the co-founder and executive director of Partners for Justice, which is designed to create a new model of collaborative public defense designed to empower. You probably read her deep dive on Twitter into Project 2025.

Please welcome to the show, Emily Galvin-Almanza! Emily! Very happy to be here. And I'm so sad that I don't have an internet-supplied jingle or joke to go along. I'm just sitting here like horrified at you guys having unearthed my deep poet history. Yeah, you do a little googling. Do the math is public. You are a published poet. I am. Poetry is the most marketable genre of literature. I don't know. Seller. Yeah. Yeah. You were doing math poetry. Yes. Poetry is math, right? Like when you have a rhythm of words, you know, the same way music is math, poetry is math. I just started with other math first and then tried to create poetic forms that adhere to that math.

Again, real bang. Yeah. Wow. Okay. That's like some like a tool type shit. You're like, I'm using sacred geometry to write my words down. Yes. If only I could be in the same category as tool,

I would be, I mean, that's the best. That's the height of my poetic career. You just made it right there. Yeah, exactly. Right. I get it. I get it. I get it.

So we did reach out to you on the strength of project, your project 2025 Twitter thread, deep dive. And then we found out like we have a bunch of mutual friends and we're a big fan of your work otherwise. But the Project 2025 thing, you were just like kind of reading it because you can read and comprehend lots of text and you're like, oh, this is worse than I imagined.

Yeah, no, what makes the Project 2025 text really, really dangerous is that it's written to sound super normal. And it's also incredibly long. It's like 900 pages long. And so if you are a layperson who's just a little bit concerned about what the Heritage Foundation

might be putting out there because you recognize that they were heavily influential in Donald Trump's last administration, and you see that a lot of his administration Donald Trump's last administration. And you see that a lot of his administration cronies had contributed to this document. You want to peruse it. It might not seem as scary as it actually is because it's written again to sound very, very normal. And that's sort of like policy speak. But having, you know, gone to law school and been forced to read lots of stuff, I think it was a good use of time to try to kind of get in there and translate for people some of the scariest aspects of the policy plan.

And then I got really far in there and wrote like a 400 tweet thread about how how bad it is and also how insane like their weird obsession with boyfriends and like how scared of boyfriends they are. Oh, yeah. Wait, what is their obsession with boyfriends and like how scared of boyfriends they are oh yeah wait what is their obsession with boyfriends oh my god so they they think that single moms are terrible um right super popular position like let's let's all hate on single moms yeah right they had this fixation on fatherhood they're of course very very interested in preserving the nuclear heteronormative family. Right. But from that flows this like weird paragraph where they actually talk about how dangerous, like a single mom is bad, but like a single mom with a boyfriend is the worst possible outcome for

children. And like this part is actually not done in like very elegant policy speak. They like actually hate on boyfriends for a while. It's just, there are these twists deep within the document that are worth it. It's like, yeah, they're probably named Craig and like they eat your cereal and like,

and they don't even ask you when you're 12 or when maybe your kid is 12, whatever. Maybe my life is bleeding into what I'm writing here. It's the policy equivalent of you're not my real dad. It's just that. Right, right. Yeah. Which is so weird. But yeah, but I mean, so many conservative men have that energy of like, you're not my real dad. And you're like, wow, dude, we weren't even talking about anything related to that. And you went with that. Okay. Okay.

You just need to take it down like six notches. Yes. Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, we will link off to the entire thread in the footnotes. We are going to get to know you a little bit better in a moment.

First, a couple of things that we're talking about later on when we get to the news. The mainstream media, it has been pointed out recently, seem to actually be, for all the talk of there being an anti-Trump bias, they really seem to help him in a lot of ways. So we just want to cover a couple small examples. The right has their new case closed winning strategy against Harris Walsh. This time it is taking down Harris's Donald's job story in the least convincing way possible. Oh, she's being Mick Swift voted? She's being Mick Swift voted. Yep. And then we're going to talk about a company called Axon. Now, I know you're hearing the name Axon, and you're like, that company sounds like they do good in the world

and probably not scary. Axon is actually a terrifying fucking company that is like the private arm of America's police, and they are experimenting with using AI to help police do more damage. So we're going to talk about that and just some of the other shit that they've done. There is a photograph that our writer, JM, put in the doc that is their CEO addressing a crowd, and he is not him. The person addressing the crowd is in a all-black suit and has a motorcycle helmet on and then an ipad strapped to the front with his face on it but is

like gesture as he delivers the speech from wherever whatever like volcanic layer he's at the person is like gesturing with his words. So it's like a weird avatar situation. That's sick, dude. It's just it's all so very on the nose. Yeah. Might also talk about this New York Times article about alternative policing and just where we're at with the mainstream media when it comes to, you know, things that aren't police, that aren't armed police. And how that's being talked about these days in the mainstream. All of that, plenty more.

But first, Emily, we do like to ask our guest, what is something from your search history that's revealing about who you are? Oh, man. So it's actually really great that you guys asked me this because a few months ago. OK, so this story is going to get weird. A deer impaled itself on my colleague's fence oh no and my colleague of course shared a photograph with our entire team to ask jesus what do i do now there's a there's a dead deer on my fence and it just so happened that i dipped into my own google search history to demonstrate how ready for this topic i actually was and i i took

a screen grab i'm actually going to show you guys to prove that it's really a screen grab of my search results from that day which were as follows wordle how to gut a deer at home oh no how to dress a deer at home inflation reduction act rebates 2024 massachusetts driving directions to the magical bridge playground that's there you go wait what's the magical bridge I'm like more like what's the magical bridge you know it's there it's actually really cool in in this area where I was living in California at the time because I teach at Stanford during the winter there is this playground that was actually designed to be really accessible for kids with disabilities and it turned out that the playground that's accessible is actually the best

playground ever made and it's everybody's favorite playground so that's the one i was taking my kid to yeah this place looks like a fucking theme park it's amazing there's like three there's more than three of them they're they're popping up everywhere they're they're the next generation of playgrounds really wow wow wow wow okay i like to see that and you can tell it's got that like tartan on the They're the next generation of playgrounds, really. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Okay. I like to see that. And you can tell it's got that like tartan on the ground. Like that makes it real soft and spongy. Yeah.

They don't hurt their little heads unlike when they were grown up and it was just all concrete. Yeah. Or I'd get like wood mulch stuck under my like toenails or something. Like try to go barefoot down a slide. Yeah. The slide burns you and then the wood impales your feet at the bottom and that makes you stronger. And then you get that nice aroma of smoky playground

for sure. Cedar. Safe for my kids, the tartan and also I feel like I jump higher on it. And so I like to show that off when I'm at the playground. I'm like, look, I'm going to dunk on these monkey bars. Oh! It's five feet high. The Cristiano Ronaldo of the Magical Bridge playground.

Yeah. Why was your partners or the person who texted you, why is their fence so sharp? Is that a thing that is normal? Great question. I don't know. They live in the South. I can't speak to Southern fence practices.

I have a lot of fence experience. I've myself constructed a lot of four-string barbed wire fence growing up in ranch culture, but never something with an impalable top. I have real questions. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Like, is that by design? Is he like, I'm going to leave the deer there to tell the other deer what happens when you try to come on our property or is it just like an an accident because it was so i'm gonna go with the former i'm gonna decide that whoever installed that fence wanted it to be a place where you could impale a head just really yeah oh yeah like what like in game of thrones when like calise takes over that place and like the

heads are like on pikes and stuff or yeah yeah i get it or in real life in human history yeah yeah that was like everywhere that was just interior or exterior decorating back in the day you need like a sconce and then a head yeah england was like we like to around christmas have poinsettias the rest of your heads just heads decorating everything what is uh what's something you think is underrated so i i thought about this question a lot i think that uh tea time is underrated and i'm gonna make a defense of tea time because when i say tea time people usually think of sort of like stodgy british pinky raised unpleasantly meticulous okay tea time is supposed to be an incredible spread at like four o'clock in the afternoon, where if you are like me, you are most ravenous. There should be pastries and cakes and like savory things.

My husband is Bolivian. Bolivians really do tea time like they do. They will fill your table at tea time. And then dinner is like a light snack. way of living one's life because that's when I actually want to just become a complete glutton and move my way across a full table at four o'clock in the afternoon when I'm just when I've had it with the world so I think tea time we should bring tea time back wow I didn't know like Bolivians are really I'm just reading about these they got salon is the day just reading about these Bolivians yeah these Bolivians they they love the tea time. South Americans love tea time.

It's a whole thing. It's very elegant. It's very comforting. I love a spread. Love a spread. A four o'clock is snack time for me. Like, I'm just wondering, like, I feel like I basically recreated this in my own life, but with a snack drawer because, you know, being raised Catholic, I have shame.

And so, like, I just have all the snacks but they're like in a drawer and i just like eat over the drawer all the different snacks but let's leave it in there it's your tea drawer now this is your high tea time shame drawer wait what do you wait what do you got in there like loose bread slices or just loose bread all sale stale. Couple pieces of Wonder Bread. No. Some mayonnaise packets. I got chips. I got some pretzels.

I got cashews. Okay. Maybe some assorted nuts in there. And then, you know, I'll bring out one bag of either chips or pretzels at a time to accompany, you know, some things from the cold cut drawer. Oh, wow. Or some, you know, some things from the cold cut drawer. Oh, wow. Or some, you know, salsa or hummus. How dignified. I know. Wait, what's the spread at a Bolivian tea time, Emily?

Oh my God. So you're obviously going to have different beverages, including tea, but you're also going to have both an array of savory and an array of sweet options. Okay. And I'm going to state right here that asking an actual Bolivian would get you a better answer. Of course. Being here without a Bolivian on the call, I'm going to highlight Salteñas, which are

a breakfast food, as one of the best Bolivian foods you can get. You can get a ton in the DC metro area, a ton of Bolivians there. You can get them all across Virginia and Southern California. But Salteñas is basically like a savory pastry full of delicious stew. And you can kind of bite off the end and sip the stew and then eat the pastry. Oh, shit.

It's amazing. Because when I see a picture, I'm like, oh, this looks like an empanada. It's not an empanada. Oh, my God. You will never touch another empanada. No, salteñas are next level. But, you know, you can have cuñapes, which are like a like a cheese pastry uh that are really fluffy and delicious they're kind of like a pão de queijo but but better oh better than pão de queijo oh way better way better okay okay go on go on

i'm here to talk about bolivian food and i will tell you it is some of the best in the world no they're gonna have all kinds of like real dishes, like meats, prepared meats and, and maybe a stew. And then you're also going to have a lot of like cakes and pastries and the sort of usual, like tea time stuff.

So not chips. Miles just started sweating like the Jordan Peel meme. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I love Palo de Queijo. Like when I first had that, the first, I'm like,

what the fuck are we doing up here? Like I love love and now seeing the other one we say is salteña the fact that it's sort of like a soup dumpling but the bolivian version was like first you gotta take the bite and then get the soup out and then keep going i'm also intrigued by the structural integrity of the pastry that can contain a stew within it this comes down to skill i mean the pastry is like really robust and like almost has a slight sweetness and thick chewiness to it, but it's

also like you're going to get judged on your skill level. Some people are beginners and they need to use a utensil or they might get stew on them. Once you're a real pro, you're just holding that salteña in one hand and longboarding down the road with no stew anywhere on your person.

Like it's the ocean spray bottle. Exactly. That guy was in my mind. with no stew anywhere on your person. Like it's the ocean spray bottle. Yeah, with the dreams by sleep. That guy was in my mind. What is something you think is overrated? I'm going to stick with my food theme. I actually think we've gotten to the point where brunch is overrated. I think just, yeah,

we're just like everybody's doing brunch every weekend and it's getting to the point where it's just like flat, flabby breakfast food at a different time of day and I'm no longer excited by it. I'm longer inspired i think i'm over it i think brunch like loses its appeal the earlier i wake up like when i was like younger and like like you know going out and shit like that and i'd wake up late i'm like yeah brunch but yeah let's eat at one that's breakfast but now i'm like no i've already. Or it depends on, you know, if there's an occasion.

But yeah, I get that. I guess, is that maybe one of our latest food fads that's going away now? Is brunch? Oh, it'll never go away. Yeah. Maybe actually the right answer to how to live one's life is to only have brunch and tea. I mean, maybe breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Two meals.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two meals. Give me a brunch. Give me a tea. Give me that tea. I mean, maybe breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Two meals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two meals. Give me a brunch. Give me a tea. Give me that tea. I mean, does the enthusiasm for tea just like make you less likely to have anything at dinner? I feel like dinner becomes an afterthought at that point. A little snack for dinner. A little light spread for tea. Okay. I like that. Yeah. Brunch is not a natural time for me to be hungry. If I've eaten breakfast, then like brunch is not really. Or you do the thing where you wake up and you're like, fuck, dude, brunch is in four hours.

Yeah. And you're like, I don't want to like go and not eat anything. So then you're like walking this tightrope of not eating before or showing up hangry. And you're like, dude, this place fucking sucks, man. Yeah, just showing up mean. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine.

Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions.

Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes! Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote.

What is it like you miss 100 percent of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This summer, the nation watched as the Republican nominee for president was the target of two assassination attempts, separated by two months. These events were mirrored nearly 50 years ago when President Gerald Ford faced two attempts on his life in less than three weeks.

President Gerald R. Ford came stunningly close to being the victim of an assassin today. And these are the only two times we know of that a woman has tried to assassinate a U.S. president. One was the protege of infamous cult leader Charles Manson. I always felt like Lynette was kind of his right-hand woman. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI in a violent revolutionary underground. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer. This is Rip Current, available now with new episodes every Thursday.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating. And so as a Black woman in recovery, hope must be loud. It grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable. It is the thread that lets you know

that no matter what happens, you will be okay. When we learn the power of hope, recovery is possible. Find out how at startwithhope.com. Brought to you by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, Shatterproof and the Ad Council. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate.

My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere starting September 25th on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and we're back we're back and yeah so there's been some talk it's being called sane washing when it comes to the trump campaign like that how the mainstream media covers president trump

former president trump's long rambling press conferences yeah and yeah but it just it does feel like there's a different standard when it comes to him possibly because of the glut of insanity that is like coming at us or possibly just because i don't know but yeah i want to make it a a good a good game everyone wants to see a good game so we gotta we gotta make sure it's close no one likes a blowout so we gotta prop up the orange guy who's deteriorating before our eyes uh but yeah like you like you said aaron rupar like on a lot of his uh videos that he clips out and puts out on twitter like whenever he cut like there we've we've played a couple of those clips where trump will be rambling on they'll cut back to someone the student like what he means to say is actually this, not that Hannibal Lecter was

a real person and a good guy. What he means is- The late grade Hannibal Lecter represents our democracy. Right, right, right. And he just wants to talk about all the ways that- He's a poet, actually. But like two recent events in the presidential race have kind of underscored how the mainstream media tries to normalize Trump and like his circus of political aid. So this week, obviously he made headlines for insisting on taking photos and filming a TikTok video for his campaign in a section of Arlington National Cemetery that prohibits that

very thing. In fact, it's a violation of federal law to use a military cemetery for campaign purposes. So while this was happening, there was a press release that came out of the Trump campaign to sort of like paper things over. And journalist Brandon Friedman, he pointed out on Twitter how the Trump campaign's press release had a very dumb typo in it. Quote, in the statement, campaign manager Chris LaCivita incorrectly used the word hollowed instead of hallowed, like on this hallowed ground hallowed out yeah not like a hollow gesture at a hallowed ground exactly right precisely almost freudian slip like so axios the daily beast they added the sort of parenthetical sick to sort of say like they misused the word

this is what they meant to say but But a few other organizations, as you pointed out, sort of caught the misuse, but then corrected it on behalf of the Trump campaign, like CNN did. And just like they're like, they meant hallowed, dude, just change it so people don't make like, you know, point out they made a typo. The New York Times predictably ran the story with the typo unedited. and edited. And then like, so if you searched in Google, you'd be like, Oh, yeah, they wrote hallowed. But when you click it, they republished it and edited it, edited it to be hallowed without any sort of reference to the fact that there was a typo. And then they had, you know, done, you'd basically like, we're doing some copy intern stuff for the camp, the Trump campaign. But this is like a subtle example, but like worth noting, because these like small accommodations are at the very least bad journalism

and at best being like no we're helping them uh because like we that they we just need them to look a little bit more like together than they obviously are so the other thing that has been like being pointed out uh across the media is from like the cnn shit like during the dnc they would have these panels of like quote undecided voters uh to be like well so what'd you think about that you're undecided and right after kamala harris gave her acceptance speech they spoke to a panel of supposedly undecided voters in pennsylvania and one man was clearly an outlier like after the speech he's like i don't know that thing was like bad most people were like yeah that was that was pretty good that that wasn't that wasn't that yeah that was fine uh he's like nah there's

nothing there's big nothing burger and then when the panel like the person who was hosting the panel said has anyone decided yet after this speech who they're going to vote for this guy immediately raises his hand he's like yeah i'm voting for trump like oh okay midas touch looked into this guy and his social media is like littered with MAGA crap. Like he's very much clearly like a Trump supporter. And when they pressed CNN and him on it, they both kind of had conflicting stories. The man said, yeah, dude, I told CNN I was a Trump, like I'm a Trump guy. And they just asked if I could keep an open mind. And I said, yeah, I can keep an open mind. So I went and they called me undecided. CNN was like, well, technically when we spoke to him, he said he hadn't decided who

he was going to support. So we invited him to speak on the panel. And that's where you're just like, what the, like, I'm always confused when they do these like undecided sort of panels. I'm like, who, like, who really are these people? Like, are they really that undecided? Because they seem pretty informed for being undecided. And then I'm like, what is it that you're waiting for on either side for you to be like, all right, Trump said the thing I needed to hear. All right. The Democrats said some of the thing I needed to hear. And this could be like a one-off or like a, you know, simple mistake, but like, you know, Parker Malloy pointed out that CNN has like a pattern of this shit. Like in 2015, they had a round table with Trump supporters

where like a woman went on like a viral tirade against Obama. And the issue here, it's just that this wasn't like some Fox brained normal person. This was like a sitting New Hampshire legislator birther who tried to keep Obama off the New Hampshire ballot, who was just presenting as just a, just a citizen in New Hampshire. Um, then in 2018, CNN also had a discussion with quote five conservative women from Florida to discuss the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. And the women's responses were, yeah, here, I'll just, I'll just play the supposed five conservative women from Florida talking about the allegations against Kavanaugh. A show of hands, how many of you believe Judge Kavanaugh when he says this didn't happen?

I believe him. I do believe him. How can we believe the word of a woman or something that happened 36 years ago, when this guy has an impeccable reputation? There was nobody, nobody that has spoken ill will about him. Everyone that speaks about him, this guy's an altar boy, you know, a scout. Because one woman made an allegation. Sorry, I don't buy it. But in the grand scheme of things, my goodness, there was no intercourse.

There was maybe a touch. Jesus Christ. Can we really? 36 years later, she's still stuck on that had it happened i mean we're talking about a 15 year old girl which i respect you know i'm a woman i respect we're talking about a 17 year old boy in high school with testosterone running high tell me what boy hasn't done this in high school so the thing is a few journalists looked into these people and at least three of them are political operatives like like one woman like was hosting fundraisers for the gop another was running for like was a candidate for office

so they had people that were like part of like the gop like machinery go in there to sort of provide intellectual cover for people to be like, yeah, whatever happened to Brett Kavanaugh is not that bad. I mean, these five normal people just said that it's nothing. So maybe, maybe it is.

They just framed them as like some people. Conservatives. Yeah. Just as conservatives that were living in Florida and their take on it. So it's just a very, yeah, it's just a, an odd,

odd practice, but maybe quite intentional. But I guess it depends on how you look at things. Emily, how do you sort of see this kind of journalism? What's your take on that? Well, it's not happening in a vacuum. When I look at this, what I see, honestly, is I'm a trial lawyer, I see the jury selection process, which is a similar space, right? It's a space where we're all pretending to be neutral and we have no preexisting beliefs and we're coming in here with a totally open mind. And yet everyone walked through the door, totally looked at my client and was like, I wonder what that person did. So we also see real restrictions on who's invited to be part of that process. Like you got to look at how media put out the call for people to sign up

for opportunities like this. The same way you got to look at how, you know, in the jury system, people with prior convictions are excluded, people who aren't on the voter rolls are excluded, people who may not have a driver's license can be excluded, people who don't have a mailing address are excluded. So you get these juries that are sort of made wealthier and whiter and more conservative by the ways in which people are even invited to attend. And then that's sort of distilled into an even more sort of pro-prosecution extract through the process of questioning people. And then if a person's like, I don't know if I can be fair, the judge is like, you can keep an open mind, right? Same, it's a CNN question. You've told us who you are and what you believe in, but you can set all

that aside, can't you? Right. So it's a question of- I'm a cop, is the defendant a cop? Huh, I can keep an open mind here. Yeah, I think so. I think so, your honor. He's my brother, but that's not a problem for me. Brother in law, technically, but yeah. So yeah, like who's the producer who's setting up the process

through which these people appear? And who's the person not doing like a basic social media search? Right, because like in that instance of the guy, like in the undecided, like, I mean, whatever that guy just, there's like, I get to be on TV or whatever. Like, I mean, that, that, that's clearly on the producers, like you're saying of how they're selecting people and whether they, they are doing it intentionally or just don't care because they're like, I don't know. They said they were a man. I'm just trying to get five people in the room so they can talk. Uh, and yeah,

I guess maybe it was a mistake for me to reach out to my friend who runs the local Republican party to ask if they knew five people who wanted to be on camera for CNN. But yeah. It's also like, what's the utility? What are we really gaining? It's not a scientific process. This group of people doesn't necessarily represent or speak for the average undecided voter. Now we know that they're maybe not even undecided at all. Maybe they're just a political operative who has a good, you know, makeup face. Right. I don't understand what the average viewer is gaining from these events. Yeah. Right. It's always meant to, I think, I don't know, like half the time when I see those panels or people undecided, like, like I said, they seem to know, they don't seem like low information

voters, you know, like, and so then I'm like, I, that's where I'm like, these people sound like they're basically Democrats or Republicans who are being like, I don't know, but probably this low information voters would be great. Like, honestly, you put people on there who first of all, normalize being a low information voter, make it okay to be like, hey, I actually don't know about this, or this issue is confusing me and I'd like a better explanation. And then present an opportunity for the mass media audience

to also receive that explanation so that people, it's the same way as a high school teacher might say, like, if you have a question, somebody else probably has the same question. Please ask your question. We could do that. I don't know why we're doing this instead.

Yeah. No stupid questions. The thing that every good professor will tell you or teacher who's like, no, no, you gotta know or else yeah you ask weird stuff or learn weird stuff because you don't ask there's that sketch in uh everybody's in la the john mulaney series where they're like doing a daily show style like interview with a guy who's like saying really stupid shit about like trump and his support for trump and then they like follow him home and he's like yeah no i'm stupid on tv for a living that's like my thing i actually got

uh interviewed by borat a couple years ago that was a career highlight and like he's just like i have this like room that i keep in my house that looks like shit and has like a confederate flag up and then but like i keep that stuff separate like i actually live with my family in the kitchen and like we have this nice house that yeah i feel like yeah these are political operatives essentially like it's the real the real version of that except you know obviously they are employed and like working within these massive parties to right convey what those parties need conveyed but i think it's also yeah it sort of shows too how we talk about how like a lot of media outlets just aren't able to reckon with real issues because of

the fact that they're so entrenched in a lot of these systems themselves it's like yeah i think this is this is good enough can we actually speak speak objectively about that? I don't know. But, you know, this is like I think, yeah, this is where a lot of the media is falling short at a time when people really need to have like the truth, which we don its equilibrium from the outside. I'm a devoted NPR listener. I go running in the morning and I pop on Morning Edition and I'm very happy to hear it. But even on NPR, there have been these few times where they're covering a Democratic event, a Republican event, and they'll be like, well, they talked about the economy, which is a bad issue for Democrats. And I'm like, is it? Because actually, listen to Bill Clinton, a person of whom I am not always a fan, but Bill Clinton spelled out how great the economy is built by Democrats over the last several decades have been. And it's weird to hear that coming from NPR. I think it's like their gesture towards equilibrium that doesn't actually speak to truth. media that we'll also get to on, you know, policing. And, you know, they there are these things that they just assume are bad for progressives that everyone disagrees with. And they just do a very surface level pass over those things, just being like, yeah, well,

those things that everybody assumes about progressive ideas around this are true. And like, we just have to take that into account as opposed to like digging into some ways that they can be proven not true. Right. Yeah. NPR drives me fucking crazy. All right. Let's take a quick break and we're going to come back and talk about policing and Axon. Finally find out a little bit more about this cool company named Axon. a little bit more about this cool company named Axon. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult.

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Forgive Me For I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions, like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? You have a lot of questions, like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed?

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or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. All right. So you may have seen this story that AI police reports are here to save the police from doing police work, basically. It's only a matter of time. You know, it was only a matter of time until the two of the shittier things on the planet, AI and policing, joined forces. In this case, the AI helps them churn out recaps of incidents using body cam footage, thus sparing the officers from having to pen lengthy reports. And the cops, like in talking about it, the ones that they're like interviewing for these puff pieces on the technology are like,

I can't write for shit. I'm basically an idiot. And this thing made me like it. This is a quote from one of the stories. It was a better report than I could have ever written. And it was 100% accurate. It flowed better. Better than I could have ever written. First of all, it's supposed to be a rough draft. Like it's not supposed to replace the reports that you're writing. It's supposed to give you a rough draft that you

then like work backwards nah nah i gotta cut corners and we how like it's called draft one by the way that's the name of the technology is draft one and he's like this is the goddamn best thing best version of the report i've ever seen and we how important are these like police reports in terms of you know like when people intersect with the justice system like is it how vital are these and how much like how much room is there for you know dubious shit to pop into these kinds of uh police reports all right to be clear they're already largely made of dubious shit like let's let's start from there okay there we go thank you things these things vary really really wildly from place to place.

So when I started out as a public defender, I was in Santa Clara County, California, in which the police are trained to write reports. So when a thing happens and the police are there, they'll write down what they saw. And then the second cop there will write down what he saw. And then they talk to a witness and they write down what the witness said. saw and then they talk to a witness and they write down what the witness said and all in all you get this packet which is really really helpful if we are going to believe that the legal system is in any way about finding truth right like you want to have detailed accounts from the people who are there about what they what they heard and what they saw i then went out to new york to work at bronx defenders and that's when i learned that the NYPD is essentially like really, really, really good at not writing stuff down.

When you get an NYPD discovery packet, it's like a whole bunch of pages. But all of the pages have the same one line copy pasted on them. It's like at the time and place of occurrence, the incident did occur. And that is when the suspected perpetrator did occur onto the occurrence. when the suspected perpetrator did occur onto the occurrence and it would happen that at that moment in geographical location in question here to four, it's just like, yeah,

we could have a whole conversation about like the police attraction to big words. They don't quite use it. Like if you want to have a great time, they've got like a defense attorney, ask a cop on the stand. What furtive means. They love saying on the stand what furtive means. They love saying that.

Everybody's doing furtive movements. But like, what is furtive to you? You're actually being pretty furtive right now. Indeed, this whole situation is furtive. So when you get to a place where essentially nothing is written down, you create a systemic problem, which is, in order for me to get any information to protect an accused person and protect their U.S. constitutional rights, I'm going to need to create a legal process to find out more about what this

cop's claims actually are, which means I may have to demand hearings that I don't actually need. Like, I might have to file suppression hearings that I don't actually need just to get the cop on the witness stand just so I can cross-examine them about what the heck they're saying they saw and did. So it's really, really, really inefficient and it's bad for truth and it's bad for justice. Like it's very, very bad for any semblance of accuracy in the system

and it causes massive delays. So all of this is to say, bad discovery is a huge driver of our system being inept at creating any semblance of truth. It's also like you have to remember that police writing reports is kind of a double edged sword here because police get a ton of overtime out of writing reports. If they make an arrest at the end of their shift and they get to sit at their desk for the next three hours, like carefully inscribing documents with at the time and place of occurrence. The event did occur. Writing furtive over and over again.

Incursive. Yeah, they make a ton of overtime doing that. So I think, I mean, when I say a ton, I mean like millions and millions. Wherever you are in the country, you should Google who the highest paid public employee in your jurisdiction was. And there's like a decent chance it was a cop who made a lot of overtime a few years ago. It was like a port authority cop in New York City. Wow. Yeah. Just like over a million bucks in overtime. And so when I think about what AI would do to this process, I think of a couple of things. One, it's less accurate because it's not giving you the police officer's impressions of what happened. It's giving you the

AI's impressions of what happened.'s giving you the ai's impressions of what happened and this is even assuming the ai doesn't hallucinate which as we know like ai's make stuff up all the time yeah so yeah like if you're gonna totally hand over your faith to a robot to tell you what happened in a video and abandon the idea that human perception is necessary to interpret what happened in a video you're also leaving by the side of the road, things that I might need to know about the cop's ability to perceive about what the cop was focused on. What, like, for example, in a police report, let's say the whole report is written about, I don't know, somebody's way of driving a car in a DUI case. And none of it's about the fact that when the person got hit totally furtively and furtively across you know when they get out of the car maybe everything they did at that point was fine

maybe they're talking fine walking fine don't have any sort of symptoms of intoxication if the entire report is about the driving then i get to cross-examine the cop on like why why didn't you talk about what happened after that like what their omissions can be really, really important to a jury to decide who's lying, who's telling the truth. You take the human perception out of that and you take away this fundamental thing. Our system is designed to have 12 people tell you if another person is lying.

12 people can't tell you if an AI is lying or hallucinating. I mean, it's just, it takes us even farther from the system having utility. And I get that in this system, we are going to consistently prioritize the efficiency of punishment over the semblance of truth. But especially with the involvement of Axon, which has a grotesque history, I'd be more than happy to chat about. This is like five alarm fire. Wait, you're saying the company that used to be called taser has a step past i like that they went from taser obviously like trying to cover up the fact that they're the company that invented the taser that for some reason has a negative connotation with it

to axon it's like so fucking aggressive yeah well it's also you know that's a nerve axon is what the electrical current runs down that stimulates the next nerve cell. So it's still like, we're gonna zap you. It's just, we're gonna zap you for people who took AP Bio. It's like the version of using Fertive. They're like, what if we just clasped it up a little bit?

I would just throw in the additional thing, and this might be like, not this might be a controversial statement, but I personally don't want to get like it. So the CEO of Axon, who is the company behind this AI technology, we'll talk about other stuff there behind, brag that the AI spares cops from the tedious work of spending half their day doing data entry. I don't want police to be out roaming the streets more with their guns, ready to get suspicious about whatever comes across their plate while they're sufficiently

bored. I feel like this is a job that we want to have a healthy amount of like downtime where they're reflecting on what they've done and like having to think about that and account for it. And this technology seems to be designed to like, what if the police were like even more gas and less breaks like built into it? What if it was just more, they don't really even have to think about it because the machine's there to like just document what they did we want it to be frictionless you know yeah you know yeah more frictionless policing aka just like out there fucking shit up more of the time i think the other thing that's really interesting too is like to your point emily

you know the overtime is where a lot of budgets go. And a lot of people, they make their, they make that money. We're like, how does that cop have that fucking car and like a boat and all this other stuff? It's like, yeah, dude, the overtime's wacky that they're never like, this will actually help cut down on costs. They're more just like, dude, it's going to help the cops dude. So they don't have to be bored at work, you know? And like, you think the way to sell it to people who might be more progressive, like, guess what, man, this could actually save a lot of money, because now they don't have the time to do, you know, claim as much overtime. But again, that's, that's part of the appeal. So they'll just be like, no, man, it just makes their job easier. So they can keep

you the citizen safe. All right, next question. You're right, though, it's also sort of exposing this terrible choice, right? We have set up policing right, though. It's also sort of exposing this terrible choice. Right. We have set up policing policy so that the vast majority of police time is spent on things that most people don't actually care about. So when you ask people what are they like scared of, it's like burglary, robbery, sexual assault, murder. And when you look at how police spend their time, the vast majority of it is on like noise complaints and unfounded calls and like somebody was peeing outside and trespassing. And sometimes on what I sort of think of as like police manufactured crime, which is like convincing someone with a substance use problem to score some drugs and also score for the undercover who will then arrest them for a felony. And the reason we don't want them on the street more is because they are out there on the street, armed, dangerous, we don't want them on the street more is because they are out there on the street armed dangerous and not investigating the things that people really care about if you look at clearance rates

a lot of people don't know what clearance rates are but it's it's the rate at which police are able to close cases yeah and in any jurisdiction you can search for your local clearance rates you'd be like all right how many rape cases are my local police even closing? Got to be in the 90s, right? Like 13 to 20 percent. It's just a whole other feminist soapbox. I'm happy to go. And in the 90s, totally across the entire country, there's like at least 90 that they've closed in the past decade. Seriously.

And that's because it's a policy choice. It's a choice from police leadership about what they're going to dedicate resources to. And if, yeah, if the answer was, OK, they're not going to spend their time writing trespassing reports, but instead we're going to dedicate real efforts to how about wage theft or large scale pollution of poisoning entire towns? We're going to set the cops on that. If they were going to investigate crimes of the powerful against the citizenry instead of writing reports, I might feel differently about it. But I don't think that became the solution to police brutality corruption uh they went with body cams and they basically have a monopoly for which they've been sued they made 461 million dollars in the first quarter of 2024 alone they're also the same company that made headlines for endeavoring to skull solve school shootings with taser equipped

drones i remember that plan was paused when the majority of axon's ethics board resigned in protest but i think probably the most relevant and also like i mentioned their ceo gives speeches via remote ipad i use an avatar man glued to the front of of the motorcycle helmet they also created excited delirium in part so all the deaths that are due to that yes so i wanted to talk about that because i also think like that feels very relevant to this because this is them getting involved in police narrative and how police justify what they're doing. And they were involved. You actually have a great video on this on your Twitter, Emily, where you talk about how about their role in the creation of and the proliferation of the term excited delirium, which is something we

covered a while back. But I think it's always worth kind of refreshing people's memory of what is excited delirium. So excited delirium is a made-up medical diagnosis that was originally invented in a sort of predictably racist way in Miami many decades ago, where a doctor claimed that people were dying of excited delirium, the sort of state of mania that caused them to behave really erratically and aggressively and dangerously, and then they perish. They just expire. And it turned out that many of the women who were originally alleged to have excited delirium had actually been killed by a serial killer. But this idea that people could become so worked up that they are dangerous and then they die was seized upon by police because in police encounters where there is a need to justify use of force it is very useful for them to claim that the person they used force

against was dangerously worked up and had this medical thing where they became a risk to everybody's safety and they had to be tased and then oh when they died from a heart attack it wasn't because they got a massive volt of electricity. It was because they died of excited delirium. So excited delirium, which is not accepted, by the way, by doctors. Like medical associations are like, that's totally not a thing. Psychiatric associations, same deal. Not a thing.

But there was that one panel that said it was a thing. So I feel like we're good here. No need to look into the panel or who funded that. I think we're good. Yeah. No need to look at how many doctors on the panel were put there by Axon. No need to connect those two. No need to also think about how much this reduces Axon's liability, right? Because if deaths are caused by excited delirium and not caused by a taser, they're not going to be able to be successfully sued. But it's actually become a serious epidemic in this country of police using excited delirium

to justify not only taser use of force, but the use of paramedics as a weapon, like we saw in the Elijah McClain case, where the police had paramedics inject Elijah McClain with a lethal dose of sedatives under this false diagnosis of excited delirium. So that seed that axon planted in 08 in legitimizing this diagnosis has now caused many many deaths and is continuing to cause deaths around the country right because like they'll hit people like ketamine and stuff and then like they like i was reading a statistic that a lot of those people end up having to be intubated because it's so severe and they're like i don't know man like the guy was excited i mean they then they also said the same thing about george floyd too yeah that was like very early on like it's excited i don't

know what you want to say man but let's let's just move on so then like so axon for them it's just more because they're sort of like hey we love what you guys do let's help out because this also helps justify the use of our products like is that sort of like their main motivation and like sort of pushing the excited delirium sort of craze along? I think it's also a legal shield. I mean, if I'm going to let's say I lose a loved one who was tased and I want to sue Taser for marketing a product as non-lethal that was in fact lethal to my loved one. And they say the medical examiner certificate doesn't say that your loved one died of an electric shock. The medical examiner certificate says excited delirium. So you can't actually get money from us in a civil suit or settlement. So it's covering them from being financially responsible for deaths

they cause. And the same thing for police. I mean, if the police are getting, the police could be sued in the same case, right? They can sue Taser for the device, sue the police for the action. But either way, sue the police for the action. But either way, if the ME certificate says this person died of excited delirium, it's a liability shield. Right. Yeah. And disproportionately applied to black men. Yes. A lot of the time.

Yeah. Right. It's a way for the police to justify that why they why they're scared. It's really reliant on racist tropes, right? On the adultification of black children. First of all, this child is a risk to me because I'm perceiving this child as older because of racial bias, but also the racist myth of dangerousness of black men in an excited state.

I mean, this is totally playing on long-term American racist tropes and sanitizing them with a fake medical diagnosis. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like something you'd get at like Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. You're like, and a bit of excited delirium for you. And you're like, ooh. And that's why we had to drown him in the chocolate river.

Yes, exactly. Just a couple more details about, is it axon? I'm going to call them Axon because that feels sufficiently violent and sinister. Their CEO, his founding story, I just like founding stories for companies and CEOs because they are the most full of shit things in America and most widely believed people. It was founded in a, everything was founded in a garage no it wasn't it's founded in like their rich dad's second home that uh was behind his first mansion uh but anyways the ceo repeatedly told the story that he started the company because his two high school friends were shot and killed he played high school football with them it's just like two guys that he like knew about who were like four or five years older than him yeah so they weren't

even he never went to high school with him yeah but like it's just you know for him he's like and man like that's the closest that i like kids who who were at your high school before you is like such a stretch to be like that's also they uh the workplace culture includes group tasings and tattooing sessions in which employees are inked with corporate insignia and by the way the drone thing well they were like all right fine when their entire ethics board resigned they did buy a drone company recently so they it seems like what well their mouth says all right fine god yeah their their money is saying that they're full full steam ahead on the taser drones front yeah so just all sorts of wild shit there. Like truly the most dystopian, like a bunch of tattoo branded, like corporate people, guy with motorcycle helmet, iPad face.

Right. Lying about like knowing murder victims. Yeah, it's all. I mean, they're in a way it all does feel very appropriate that then it's like. And now that's what I like to do is help other people lie about stuff. And I get to make money. And there's the institutional investment in this company is wild too. Oh yeah.

It's like, cause they know they're like, wait, how much they make in Q1. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're buying.

But just generally, I just want to like kind of get your take, Emily. There was recently this New York times article about a, the headline is would a group opposed to police blow the whistle on its founder and it was like this ai app that was like we're gonna like create an alternative to the police by taking people's you know complaints and routing them to like some of these other police alternatives it turned out to be like the the

founder just like didn't have the ability to pull it off and was spending some of the money on like clothing and vacations that you know like that i'm drifting sure you can find scams in any non-profit like category but the way the new york times writes about it and like frames this article is that whole argument of like oh you think the police are bad at their jobs let's see what you say when you're being robbed is like basically the whole thesis of the argument and what it comes down to if you read the article, is one person on the team is like, I didn't want to turn him over to the police because he's a Black man and I fear what would happen to him. And then another person is like, yeah, but I did turn him over to the attorney

general because I know that you don't usually call the police on white collar crime because they won't do shit. So anyways, like the attorney general is working on an investigation. It might be civil. It might be criminal. But the way they framed it is so much like based on this bad faith reading of any criticism of the police. And it just feels generally like the tone of the mainstream media and the the democratic party recently is like boy those protests in 2020 were you know unpopular let's never fight again babe to the police and it's like i don't know it's just so fucking frustrating like meanwhile, police killings haven't have just like stayed the same or gone up. So like, where, where are we with this? Like what, you know, there were some programs that were funded that like worked really well. Like Denver had a controlled trial of a program that

provides housing subsidies to people at risk of homelessness and found a 40% reduction in arrests. Like there's all these cool examples. They get like dashed off really quickly in a New York Times article that like has a counterpoint for everything that might suggest that like there could be alternatives to our fucking terrible idea of a system that if you've been to any other country in the world, you're like, oh, wow, why do we do it the way we do it? But yeah, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on like where we're at in our conversation

in the mainstream. So first of all, we're really lucky in this one way, which is that we are overrun with cool solutions. Like I'm writing a book right now. Fuck my book, it's coming out in 2026. It's gonna be a lay person's guide to the criminal legal system and all of its horribleness and also solutions. Like I'm going to spend two thirds

of the book on problems. And then I'm going to present a whole bunch of solutions. I had originally intended to write one chapter on solutions. I'm now at like page 88 of a hundred of all of these solutions because there are just so many fantastic things happening that have better data than the status quo. Like we don't have data strongly suggesting that police are a feasible preventative mechanism. Police can disappear problems. They can take people and put them in spaces where they are no longer visible to the general public and where they may be then violently harmed in ways that make them more likely to engage in crime in the future. So police may be sort of like temporarily making a problem disappear in a way that long

term makes it worse. We have that data. We have a ton of data on like the STAR program in Denver or cahoots in Oregon or, you know, other alternatives to police popping up around the country. Massive public support for this. Most voters would love to have mental health first responders. And actually most cops, if you ask them, are like, yes, I would like to also no longer be treated like I'm a trained social worker because I'm not one. And I would like that to not be part of my job. What's really what bugs me about the perspective you just described, right? Which is like, oh, these people who don't want to use the police, what happens when they need the police? Well, okay.

When we on election day hear from voters that they are scared to go to their local polling place because there are proud boys outside the polling place intimidating potential voters, no one is saying, well, it's your problem if you don't like the proud boys, don't you just have a way to work it? No, we say, okay, this is a problem because people have a legitimate fear. It is a legitimate

fear of an organized effort which is intimidating and threatening harm to the general public. And because the general public is afraid, we, the government, should probably take action to protect the general public. The blind spot with regard to when that organized harmful force is a governmental body is obscene. So by blaming people who are like, hey, I actually I'm nervous about calling the police on my black boss because black men get killed by police at inordinate rates. And also not to mention that subject to illegitimate prosecutions and overcharging and charge stacking and longer sentences and the incredible damage even of a pretrial process. And by the way, I'm saying this with great care

because here's a person who's accused and has not been found guilty of anything. So really weighing, hey, do I want to subject this person to all of these risks or is there a better way for me to seek accountability and truth without those risks of lethality, injustice, ruinousness? and the problems you highlight are real and work on these problems to come up with something better is abrogating its duty to the public in favor of the optics of being pro-cop. Right. Yeah. Yeah. The pro-cop turn that's happened in like the Democratic Party. I mean, it's not that they were anti, but like just I saw you retweet an article or a thread about how the platform changed because I was like, I was definitely looking at a lot of the, I was really interested in the foreign policy stuff that was in the platform. And I was like, oh wow, like you did a ton of one eighties here compared

to 2020. And then reading sort of the excerpts on what was happening with policing was also very like, oh, we're, we're really embracing this thing about being like, let's not talk about the death penalty anymore. I know we were talking about chokeholds. Let's like really tamp that down. And it really is wild how much it's become because I think obviously this whole election is set up to be, we have a prosecutor and a felon. And so because of that framing,

we're going to really lean into a lot of this, like the prosecutorial aspects of this and also make it feel like, yeah, man, we're the cops again. And that's okay. That was just kind of like, I mean, I was very cynical in 2020 when I saw this sort of like uptick and be like, yeah, we really need to do something. And that's the most that will happen. I will say that we need to do something. But now to see it like really formally stripped out, you're like, oh, right, right, right. This was never a real concern. But how do you sort of perceive that sort of like shift now, or at least now that, you know, even in their written platforms, it's just sort of like, yeah, those are problems, but, you know, we can address them at some point later. we can address them at some point later. I mean, the death penalty thing I really don't get because Harris has been against the death penalty for a lot of her career, was criticized as AG for

upholding the law instead of acting on a moral objection that she has to the death penalty, which is super expensive and has resulted in the death of a lot of innocent people because our system gets it wrong a lot because of things like junk science and bad eyewitness IDs and insufficient funding of public defense. So let's just like cabin. This is like, I don't, I really don't get the democratic party stepping away from opposing the death penalty. I think polling on it has not changed dramatically. Like Americans are not like rabidly pro death penalty now. So I really don't get it. But here's what I'll say about the prosecutor versus felon thing. It's being treated as a sort of vicious backing of violent force against crime,

but it doesn't have to be. Prosecutors are unique among lawyers. Rarely will you hear me say nice things about prosecutors. I'm going to now say some nice things about prosecutors. They have an ethical duty to do justice. That is a unique ethical duty. No other kind of lawyer has that duty. Now, I just got done teaching a course to some really talented law students. And in one of my exercises, I made half of them be defense lawyers and half of them be prosecutors. And I told the prosecutors in a bail argument, you have this unique ethical duty. You have to do justice and not just justice for the people who were harmed in a crime or who you think of as part of the community. You have to do justice for everybody. That includes the accused person and their family and their kids and their

loved ones. That includes everybody. When you talk for the people, you represent everybody. And when I told them that their assignment would be graded on how well they were able to consider everyone's needs, safety and justice, they got up there on the record and did radically different things than I've ever seen a prosecutor do in real life. And largely we're thinking of restorative solutions and root causes and like how they could heal a community instead of just punishing and disappearing a person. If what prosecutor means is somebody who is enshrined with governmental authority to do justice for everyone in the community, including people who might be opposed to that very prosecutor, I think it could actually be a very powerful encapsulation of the best version of a leader, right? A person who's going to take this seriously and care for all of our well-being and yes, stand up to abuses of people with less power, which is really what we would want prosecutors to stand up to the most, I think. Certainly,

it's not being done that way. I think the rhetoric sucks. I think half of Americans have had a loved one locked up. I just think that the rhetoric doesn't have to change if it was made smarter. In order to be smarter, though, the policy would not have to shift towards tough on crime. It would have to shift towards evidence based root cause thinking and solutions that shift us towards something better than our shitty status quo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now it just, no, let's embrace the status quo and bring it closer and closer and closer. But yeah, that's a, yeah, such a, the whole time I'm like, wow. It like the, the thing that really makes you think a lot too, is like, we have so many people who are prosecutors that ascend in politics. And that's

when like when Kentucky Brown Jackson was like the first public defender who had sat on the Supreme Court. I was like, is that true? Oh, my God. Oh, writ large. The federal bench is largely prosecutors. I actually read I wrote a really mean email to get today, guys. Like my my local representative, who I love, is like moving to run for the state, a different state office. And he endorsed there's a it's a two candidate race.

I live in a place with major housing issues. There's not enough housing for people cost of housing are too high and one of the candidates is a housing organizer a local housing organizer and the other candidate is a prosecutor guess who got the endorsement he does the fucking prosecutor and i wrote him a note being like like come on this housing is the issue of our region. If you are going to make prosecution, once again, a blind path to power, you at least have to justify why you are overlooking someone whose life work is in the zone we most need. And the thing that bugs me about it the most is that it tells young people. I mean, in my work, I work with public defenders all over the country and I help them expand their practice and expand what they can offer their clients. And I place a lot of new professionals, usually young people, into jobs in public defense.

And as they start out their careers, I'm looking at how they think of their career trajectory. They're doing great things. I'm going to learn all about how fucked up America's public systems are and I'm going to carry that knowledge into my own change-making career. But to everybody else, the vast majority of young people, future lawyers who are not like these dedicated, brilliant advocates, they think, okay, I'll be a prosecutor for like two years and then I'll get my elected office. If I just incarcerate young black men and separate families and crush people's dreams and lives and maybe cause a few deaths, then I could be a state. Right. I've been vetted.

Right. And I've done the work. Right. And we shouldn't we shouldn't make change making power reliant on willingness to harm others. Yeah. All right. Sounds like we have a lot of work to do.

Emily, Galvin, Almanza, what a pleasure having you on the Daily Zeitgeist. Where can people find you, follow you, support your work and all that good stuff? Well, if they want to support expanding and improving public defense around the country, really transforming what we mean by public defense and getting more help for poor people with housing and employment and benefits and transportation and all the things that people actually need, they can go to www.partnersforjustice.org, where they can learn all about our work to support public defenders nationally. They can also catch us on Twitter at at PFJ underscore USA or Instagram at partners for justice, or they can follow and I guess I

should say and they can follow my much my spicy tweets at Galvin Almanza. It's just my last name. I do a weekly video on things that are awful in our legal system. So if people want to get that spike of outrage once a week, come on Twitter with me and I will give you a spike. Yeah. But it's not just blind outrage. You also have solutions and ideas for things to do. I do.

Highly recommend. Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Okay, I'm going to be really nerdy, guys. There was a paper that came out a couple months ago from Vita B. Johnson, who is a lawyer, and she wrote a paper called Whom Do Prosecutors Protect? And I know that most laypeople are not like, you know what I'm waiting for is the next hot law paper to drop, And I'm going to just dive into that bastard and roll around. But it's really good. And it's really accessible. And it details every single way in which the kind of problematic incentives we've been talking about prosecution

as a path to power and the inter reliance between prosecutors and police are robbing ordinary Americans of their chance at justice. And it's a really good paper. Damn. That sounds good. Amazing. Miles, where can people find you and what is the latest legal brief that you've been in? Oh yeah. Let me, give me a second about the legal brief. Uh, I found this one, the Pelican brief. Oh hell yeah, man. You can find me at Miles can find me at miles. Oh, yeah. That actually makes sense. Huh? Huh. Thanks for that little factoid.

I'm going to take that to the, take that to the bar tonight. Um, you can find me at miles of gray on Twitter and Instagram. You can find Jack and I on the basketball podcast. Miles and Jack got mad boosties. You could also find me talking about 90 day fiance on four 20 day fiance. Um, a tweet I like, oh man. So the,

you know, libs of Tik TOK person, Chaya Rachik tweeted out a few days ago. It said, I'm looking for parents anywhere in Ohio who have kids in public schools to be eyes and ears on the ground. Your identity will remain anonymous and protected. Please DM me. If you fit this criteria,

Patton Oswalt quote tweeted this and said chaya i am so glad you're doing this there's a boy in our neighborhood elliot a child of divorce who we think is hiding an alien in his closet with the help of his siblings gertie and michael it just killed me hitting her with that et But yeah, that is one of my favorite tweets recently. Leave Ohio public schools alone, y'all. I am a product of Ohio public schools. They do fine work every once in a while. All right.

Tweet I've been enjoying. Katie at Skatey420 tweeted, they should call that guy Edgar Allen Poem because of all those poems he did. Similarly smart. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Brandy Jensen

tweeted, I love when an IT guy refers to my laptop as your machine. That is kind of cool. Makes it sounds so cool you can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien you can find

us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist we're at The Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram we have a Facebook fan page and website DailyZeitgeist.com where we post our episodes and our footnotes we'll link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode as well as a song that we think you might enjoy Miles what song do you think you might enjoy.

Miles, what song do you think people might enjoy? I stumbled across a producer by the name of Harrison and just going through some of their tracks. And there's this one track that's really popular of his that's called Selfish High Heels. And it's with him, Young Bae and Macross 8299. But the sound of it is like 80s, like Japanese city pop kind of stuff from the 80s. But a little bit more modern and futuristic. It's kind of trippy. So I really enjoyed it. So this is Selfish High Heels by Young Bae and Harrison.

It also creates the next Pixar movie about anthropomorphic shoes. You got the funky sneakers sneakers, selfish high heels, silly slippers. I don't know. You guys do the work. I'm not going to waste any more of your time. The kind of high, high tops, like they smoke a little weed, you know? Oh, yeah. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this week. We are back on Tuesday, after Labor Day, to tell you what was trending over the long weekend, and we will talk to you all then. Bye! I'm Jess Casavetto, executive

producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me for I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me for I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jemaine Jackson-Gadson. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just

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Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. Every great player needs a foil. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Listen to the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese.

On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. I'm Keri Champion, and this is Season 4 of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's basketball. And on this new season, we'll cover all things sports and culture.

Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio apps, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. In California, during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI.

Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts.